


Your Hand

by selkieskin



Category: EastEnders
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Ficlet, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, POV First Person, Religion, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 23:04:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2001372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selkieskin/pseuds/selkieskin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monologue. Syed's reasons for not coming out. Ficlet written in 2010.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from my fanfiction.net account. Originally written in 2010.

Unless you've been there, there is no way you can comprehend why. Why I would try to deny it. Why such a simple feeling would panic me so much, make my throat tighten so much that I feel I can't breathe, like I'll give myself away with my own revulsion at myself.

Perhaps it would be better if he was somehow, smaller. Less of a wonderful person, less of a tall, muscular and handsome Adonis. Because, quite truthfully, that is how I see him. There is no way I can compare to him, he shames me in every aspect. When I am with him, I feel so small and inadequate, submissive to him and all that he is. I look up to his chiselled features and feel his solid muscles and I feel afraid because I know he could overpower me in an instant, but he does not unless at that moment I am weak and I let him. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of my terrible, sinful power over him as those same muscles quiver under my touch. And then I remember that this person... is not a woman, and I feel like my entire sense of masculinity is being betrayed. Betrayed by my own body, nonetheless. My mind tortures me as well, the absent days and sleepless nights where I can feel every fibre of my being screaming at me to just do something, anything, and I know I can't while at the same time my body is racked by the knowledge that, yes, I could, if I just went for it. But I have been there many times before, the stage of being nearly there, so nearly there, and it is like being about to lose your balance on the edge of an abyss that is so deep that you cannot see what wonderful or terrible things you would find if you just let yourself fall.

I hate that he has to lead me always like a temperamental child who doesn't know what it really wants as I battle every day with these voices in my head that tell me different fantastical stories of possible choices, possible futures. Because, at the end of the day, the most terrible thing is that the responsibility for all this lies on me. There is no-one else to blame for the choices that I make, and I must make them alone, utterly alone, and I'm scared of what I may reap by them. I have seen his devastated, tear-stained face as I have failed again, again and yet again, and I have also seen this face on my beloved parents as I continue to disgrace and dishonour them with my constant selfish acts. There are times when I lose control, and he, my lover, sees me how I could be, and there are also times when I remember what I wanted out of life before this, and he sees me as... how I should be. I should be better than this. Whenever I even so much as smile at him, there is no way I can do so without the guilt coming crashing down like the heavens on my shoulders, threatening to crush me.

And, more than all of these things, I love my God. The paradigm by which I have lived my life, the essence of what is pure and good, the morals and framework of the world in which I live. When I feel these things for him, there is suddenly no gravity, I have no way to orientate myself because if I am truly this way, then I no longer have a world around me to tell me that up is up and down is down.

There would only be... your hand. And that thing is so small, that I'm not sure I can survive yet if that is the only thing left at the end of it all.


End file.
